Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Under the knife, again

It's only the second day of my "Christmas vacation" and I'm already having to wake up early for appointments. Bah! I had one last follow-up appointment with my family doctor to remove a suspicious looking mole on my inner forearm.


He just injected some magical serum in my arm that immediately numbed it, scraped off the mole, and then took a tool from a separate machine (top right) and cauterized the incision site. One minute, tops, and I didn't feel a thing. He's sending it out for biopsy and then I can call in the end of next week and get the results. After that, he said I'm a free (wo)man for six months. I do have one more appointment with the dermatologist on Thursday to look at my skin rash again, but that's a whole other disaster.

Once I got home I got started on my cookie baking for bible study tomorrow. We always exchange cookies instead of gifts for Christmas, but in reality everybody gives gifts too albeit small ones. We each need to bring two dozen cookies for each person so I chose four different recipes to make up my two dozen. The first ones I made today were called Coffee Cordials and were from a year-old Rachael Ray magazine;
They were espresso flavored cookies with an espresso and whiskey (I used Southern Comfort) glaze and topped with a chocolate covered espresso bean. The first batch I made too small and too thin so they were too crispy, but I fattened up the second batch and they looked much better so they'll be the ones to go to bible study. The second cookie I made were Caramel Whiskey Cookies from my latest Healthy Cooking magazine.
It's a butter cookie base with a whiskey (SoCo again) and caramel topping and then drizzled in chocolate. I rotated batches of them in the fridge to help harden them so I could stack them sooner since in my infinite wisdom I've never bought more than one cookie rack. Remind me to put that on my Christmas list next year!  After lunch I squeezed in one more recipe for the day. This one was from an old Pillsbury cookie book I bought at a used book store years ago. They're cardamom shortbread wedges with a vanilla glaze.
These were delicious, but terribly delicate. Just trying to cut them caused four casualties. But once they sat out for a couple of hours they hardened up and quit trying to fall apart. Now I've got a table full of Christmas platters with cookies evenly divided between them (including a small container for mom!) wrapped up like Fort Knox to avoid an ant invasion overnight. Just one more recipe tomorrow morning before our get together in P-town in the evening and then I can hang up my apron and oven mitts for another season.

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